My experience with some other webmaster forums is that if you allow these threads to get indexed, you will attract a lot of non-webmasters who are interested only in trolling or spamming. This eventually prevents real community members from engaging in genuine conversation.

We have the other forums crawlable, because we want to attract people interested in those topics.

My experience with some other webmaster forums is that if you allow these threads to get indexed, you will attract a lot of non-webmasters who are interested only in trolling or spamming. This eventually prevents real community members from engaging in genuine conversation.

We have the other forums crawlable, because we want to attract people interested in those topics.

Hm, good thinking. I never thought of doing this.

Have you experimented with this on and off (perhaps on another website)? If so, what were the results like?